Against school: an epistemological critique

ABSTRACT

The paper argues that the modern school is an ‘intolerable’ institution.¹ Contrary to the sensibilities of educational research that look for more and/or better schooling as a way of making education more equal and more inclusive, our position is against the modern European school as an institution of normalisation within which equality and inclusion are impossible. Foucault’s strategy of reversal is used as a means of subversion to argue for an end to schooling. Concretely the paper highlights the epistemic fundamentals of the modern school and in particular the dynamics of normalisation related to the universal and the production of inequalities and isolated individuals. The paper asserts the need to be ‘against’ rather than ‘for’ the school and the abandonment of the ‘redemptive perspective’. Over and against this, we propose the need to think education differently and apart from the school in order to open up other educations, and specifically education as an ethical activity, an exploration of limits, and a politics of the self.

KEYWORDS:

• School
• epistemology
• politics of the self
• Foucault
• critique
• reversal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We refer to the modern school in Foucault’s sense of modernity as an attitude and a power/knowledge regime. That is, a form of power that developed since the sixteenth century, drawing on and expanding an older technique of ‘pastoral’ power that has it’s origins in Christian institutions (Foucault, 1982, p. 782).

2 A further argument could be developed that inclusion is itself a technology of normalisation. Byrne (2014, p. 235–-236) argues that within the social inclusion movement ‘the burden of change continues to be placed upon children with disabilities, their “ability” to adjust to naturalised pedagogies, to “cope” and overcome their impairment to become “one of us” as opposed to a somewhat burdensome “minority of one”’. See Peters and Besley (2014) and Allman (2013) for a discussion of the political discourse of social inclusion. Allman (2013) suggests that the birth of the modern rhetoric of l’inclusion sociale began in French thought with Lenoir to seek ‘a means to reintegrate the large numbers of ex-industrial workers and a growing number of young people excluded from opportunities to join the labour force in the new economies of the 1970s and beyond’ (p. 8) and ‘social inclusion and exclusion can function as apparati that problematize people on the margins, and by extension, contribute to their governance and control’ (p. 1). Olssen (2003) replaces inclusion with diversity.

3 https://www.norrag.org/facing-the-climate-change-catastrophe-education-as-solution-or-cause-by-iveta-silova-hikaru-komatsu-and-jeremy-rappleye/

4 We are grateful to Meg Maguire, Trinidad Fructuoso-Gallego, Felipe Acuna, Pablo del Monte, Taylor Webb, Frank Coffield and Matthew Clarke, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this paper.